I’ve received a lot of parcels, but never one with so many stamps. Great work to whoever calculated postage and stuck them all on. Australia Post must have worked out that the right amount of stamps were on there too at some point, unless they just looked and decided to take it on trust.
I Know You Know from Esther, a new album from The Welcome Wagon.
The current convention of describing those who die as having passed away provides a less confronting way of dealing with death.
Christians have seemingly lost the biblical distinction by which we instead could simply say that believers who die have fallen asleep.
Perhaps through a desire to avoid any impression of the doctrine of soul sleep, or to avoid having to articulate the distinction that we believe that only Christians will wake to everlasting life we use a familiar and largely meaningless expression.
This is from an article called Sleepers Awake by Todd Brewer. It appears in The Mockingbird issue 21, themed on Sleep. It was also posted on their website.
Brewer looks at how Jesus and Paul refer to death in various contexts in the New Testament, what those references mean for Christians when they come to faith in Jesus, and when the earthly lives of those disciples end. To sleep in Christ will be to wake in glory.
…when Paul uses the literal language of death for believers, he seems to mean it more abstractly. Believers “have died to the law” (Rom 7:4), or they are living in the world as though they are dead, yet living (2 Cor 6:9). Describing his life as an apostle, Paul declared that he dies daily (1 Cor 15:31). He uses the literal language of death to describe the death of Christians before their hearts stop beating and their neurons stop firing. Paul believes that death must be experienced before death actually arrives. But it’s not some Stoic acceptance of death’s inevitability — that one must “come to terms” with Thanatos before he comes knocking on your door. No, the kind of death Paul has in mind is the death of the old self, crucified with Jesus, so that one may also share in the life of the risen Jesus (cf. Rom 6:5). Or as Paul succinctly declared, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
This “death before death” then informs how Paul writes of the physical demise of believers. In these cases, Paul almost exclusively uses the metaphor of sleep. He says that Jesus’ earliest followers have now fallen asleep (1 Cor 15:6); a widow is free to remarry after her husband has fallen asleep (1 Cor 7:39); and some have fallen asleep after eating the eucharist in an unworthy manner (1 Cor 11:30). Writing of sleep in such mundane contexts suggests that the metaphor was commonplace for Paul, his go-to way of talking about the death of Christians.
But why is “sleep” Paul’s preferred language here? His usage elsewhere arises precisely within debates over the resurrection, explaining how it’s possible that death is defeated and that Christians can still die. When members of the Thessalonian church begin to die, they urgently write to Paul, worried that these individuals will miss the boat when Jesus returns. Paul assures them that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. They should not grieve over those who have fallen asleep, like the Gentiles, who have no hope (1 Thes 4:13-14).
My latest copies of The Mockingbird magazine arrived today, including issue 21, which is themed on Sleep.
We had a couple of hot days Saturday and Sunday; watching those gathered on heated evenings struggle to focus is a feature of such times.
And yet, in these circumstances rest is not a failing, it is a reaction to the circumstance.
Which helps me remember that our primary goal is not to keep people stimulated and excited, but to help them be assured of him in whom we rest.
This is from an article called Sleeping In Church by Greg Paul. It was also posted on their website.
“In peace I will both lie down and sleep,” the psalmist writes, “for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety” (Ps 4:8). While it seems unlikely that he had worship gatherings in view, perhaps it’s a strange sort of compliment to the church and preacher if someone falls asleep during the service now and then.
Many churches and monasteries of former times had an officer called a beadle, among whose functions was the responsibility of keeping congregants awake. In Puritan churches, the beadle would patrol the aisles carrying a long pole with a brass knob on the end with which he could rap the noggin of a dozing parishioner. The rigor of that expression of Christian faith reflected a view of a God who would not be amused by gentle snores in the midst of worship — a God who, perhaps, was not much inclined to be amused at any time for any reason.
While beadles have, thankfully, gone the way of frock coats and buckled shoes, the now more common mode of church services as performance/production — that is, a kind of spiritually oriented show presented to a largely passive audience — seem more oriented to sensory, emotional and (sometimes) intellectual stimulation than to restfulness or a deep sense of safety. We’re still being kept awake, but by other means. Would it be too bold to suggest that we seem now to serve a God who regards amusement, or at least entertainment of a sort, as a key function of the church?
While we can certainly benefit spiritually from those sorts of stimulation, I do wonder if we’re missing something. Today more and more voices are declaring that churches are too frequently not safe places; often the people crying out have already left because of exclusion or abuse. The tragic and unspeakably sordid list of popular Christian leaders, organizations, and megachurches revealed as purveyors of spiritual, emotional, financial, gender and especially sexual betrayal and oppression grows by the day. The personalities and situations that are extreme enough to make the news must surely be only the tip of the iceberg: they are as likely to thrive in a small rural congregation as anywhere else.
Any congregation, including its leadership, that believes the church’s primary purpose is providing a product to be consumed by congregants — even if it is regarded as a spiritual one — has surely fallen asleep. And not in the sense that the psalmist describes. I mean more in the character of the disciples catching forty winks at Gethsemane while Jesus sweats blood and the betrayer approaches.
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